Not detected. The online scanner did not identify the website which contained material that had been plagiarised.

Basic plagiarism – copied and pasted from an electronic book

Not detected. The online scanner did not identify the electronic book which contained material that had been plagiarised.

General observationsEase of use, overall experience. If other features were included (e.g. spelling, grammar check), how easy were they to use and how useful were they?

iThenticate calls itself as a "professional plagiarism scanner" and is advertised across the internet. Its website, as might be expected, is professional looking – although it's not as busy as some of its competitors who fill up every square centimetre with facts you ought to know.Use of their plagiarism scanner is not free, even on a trial basis, and it's really expensive – the most expensive on the internet at the time of writing. 1 submission with up to five revisions costs a whopping $50.Once a purchase has been made the user is able to upload their document for scanning. The process is straightforward and operates like other online scanners available. When the scanner was first tested the results came back very quickly – showing 33%. At first I thought that an initial scan of the document had been carried out by the computer and that this would be followed up by some kind of human intervention. After all, $50 to use an automated system seemed incredible.

When I came back to check a few days later, the report was still showing "33%' and at this point I realised that 33% was its plagiarism score and had nothing do with the processing of the document. I had wrongly assumed that, for $50, a human would also carry out a number of checks; however, this was my mistake – when checking the FAQ section it was confirmed that $50 is the cost for an entirely automated plagiarism search.

During tests, the scanner only detected plagiarism in half the sample documents – about the average for both free and subscription based checkers and, significantly, it was not as reliable as some free checkers. It detected blanked plagiarism, the plagiarism of an online pdf and a plagiarised article where some of the words had been removed. It did not detect plagiarism in a document where some of the words had been changed, in a paraphrased document or in an online ebook.

Like many of the "professional" checkers which charge a fee, iThenticate's website goes to great lengths to explain why you should purchase their scanner. "24 million webpages, 32 million pages of scholarly content items and 90+ million news pages, magazines and books" sounds great – except it failed to detect plagiarism 50% of the time in our tests.

The harshest criticism has been reserved for iThenticate's plagiarism scanner as it's by far the most expensive option available, at the time of writing, yet it performs less well than many free online scanners. Don't spend your money here – it's really not worth it.